Busting the Top 5 Myths About Remote Workers

Scott has 15+ years of experience recruiting software engineers and is the Director of Client Success at Toptal.

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Picture this…

You meet your friend Jeff for lunch. Jeff’s been managing development of a new product and it’s about to be released. He’s pumped.

But the product release isn’t the main thing that’s got Jeff so excited. Instead, Jeff can’t stop raving about his new hire, Luis.

Jeff says Luis is the best software engineer he’s ever had on his team. Luis doesn’t just hit targets others can’t, he creates and hits targets others don’t even see. He’s virtually always available, always accountable, and brings more to the table than anyone Jeff’s ever worked with. And Luis just ‘get’s it’.

As Jeff goes on, you’re blown away. But you’re really only half listening at this point, as you picture what it would be like to have someone like Luis on your own team…

What? Remote? How can that be? Everyone knows that hiring remote software developers is fraught with challenges. It’s hard enough if they’re relatively local. It’s even tougher if they’re remote. And it can be nothing short of a disaster if they’re overseas. Luis can’t possibly be that good.

Sorry dude. Your stereotypes have just been shattered.

Wow. You don’t know what to think.

Reality check

In fairness, the remote employment stereotypes you’ve had in your mind until now aren’t entirely unfounded, especially when it comes to offshore workers. Recent years have seen an increasing flood of cutthroat overseas development shops promise extremely inexpensive services and then fail to deliver by even the most basic of professional standards. With so many negative experiences, a growing stigma has developed that all offshore workers are low quality, undependable, and unable to communicate effectively.

To be sure, there certainly are pitfalls to be aware of and to avoid when hiring remote workers, especially overseas. But if the negative stereotype of remote hiring were as across-the-board-true as some would have you believe, then how does one explain the dramatic 80% increase in the remote workforce from 2005 to 2012? The simple fact is that working and hiring remotely is a growing and increasingly successful paradigm.

And then there’s Dell – the IT mega-vendor with annual revenues that were in excess of $62 billion in 2012. Dell must be highly confident in the viability of remote work as part of their core business model as well, having recently announced a goal of having half of its employees work remotely within 6 years (by 2020).

Clearly, there must be more to hiring software engineers and working remotely than traditional stereotypes would lead one to believe. In truth, when employed properly and intelligently, a staffing strategy that incorporates remote team members can be a huge win for everyone involved. Some of the best talent in the world telecommutes and, whether we want to admit it or not, a growing percentage of that talent is overseas.

With that in mind, this post pulls the rug out from under 5 of the most prevalent myths about remote workers, with a specific focus on software developers.

MYTH #1: You get what you pay for.

REALITY: Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. It all depends.

Many growing companies and start-ups are realizing that the very best developers may not be located within commuting distance of their offices. Even if they are, their rates may be ridiculously disproportionate to their skill levels. A local hire in no way guarantees a wise investment.

A key problem with hiring overseas team members is that most employers go about the process of selecting and hiring these remote workers entirely wrong. When most employers turn their sights to hiring overseas, they make the penny-wise-and-pound-foolish decision to exploit the differential in labor costs to its fullest and hire the cheapest labor they can find. Some even fool themselves into thinking they’ve avoided this trap by hiring a not-quite-as-cheap software developer, but they still rarely find in the long run that their time or money was well spent.

When hiring a remote worker, the primary focus (as with any hiring) needs to remain on quality. Any cost savings that result should merely be viewed as an added bonus. Decisions in life that are solely based on economics rarely prove to be wise ones, and the same most certainly holds true for hiring remote software engineers.

Employ the best, not the cheapest, and you’ll be the beneficiary of remote team members who are nothing short of stellar.

Ever worked with anyone from the U.S. who was fired for underperforming? I would venture to say that we all have. There are great and terrible developers in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, just as there are in Argentina, Portugal, and Hungary. Quality is not a deterministic function based on geographic location.

And not anything against the good ’ol USA but we actually ranked 30th worldwide (out of 65 countries tested) for math in 2012, and that’s down from a ranking of 25th worldwide in 2009. Not a good sign. And this is particularly significant with regard to hiring software developers, since algorithmic aptitude can often be an essential underpinning to effective software engineering. Don’t get me wrong, we have some of the very best developers here in the U.S., but to say that top developers from other countries are not as good as those in the U.S. would simply not be true. Top developers are who they are because they stay up-to-date on leading-edge technology and because of their commitment to technical excellence, not because of where they are located geographically.

A top developer is a top developer regardless of where they are located.

MYTH #3: Differences in culture, language, and time zone are serious problems.

REALITY: They can be, which is why it’s so important to hire wisely.

Yes, the potential for cultural, language, and time zone challenges do exist when hiring a remote web developer or software engineer, but they can certainly be surmounted through a highly exacting recruiting process that centers around an uncompromising commitment to excellence.

Hyam Singer’s post In Search of the Elite Few discusses a methodology for finding and hiring the best software engineers in the industry. That approach is no less applicable to remote or overseas candidates than it is to those who are local.

So with that in mind, let’s examine the cultural, language, and time zone challenges of remote hiring in more detail:

Culture. In the context of hiring, when people refer to culture, they often really mean work ethic and moral standards. During the interview process, posing hypothetical “ethical and moral dilemmas” – that don’t have black-and-white right and wrong answers – is a great way of gauging a candidate’s business ethics and moral compass.

Language. There’s no denying that the ability to communicate clearly with our colleagues is essential. Problematic misunderstandings can easily arise from misinterpreted subtleties in language, a problem which is exacerbated when working with someone remotely. It is therefore crucial to thoroughly evaluate communication skills when selecting a remote team member, especially if his or her native language is something other than English. An otherwise stellar team player can prove to be more of a liability than an asset due to an inadequate command of the language.

Time Zone. First of all, the U.S. shares its four time zones with numerous other “offshore” cities that have high concentrations of talented software engineers, so “offshore” and “time difference” are not necessarily synonymous. Moreover, as long as the time of day at the remote location is within 5 or 6 hours of your time zone (which is true in a large percentage of cases), you’ll always have at least a few hours of overlapping “at work” time each day.

MYTH #4: Remote developers won’t integrate well with your team.

REALITY: If they’re good, they’ll bend over backwards to prove themselves to be stellar team players.

A sharp developer is not only sharp technically, but is also socially and professionally astute, and is therefore well aware of the reservations and skepticism that you may have.

Moreover, just as it is hard for top-notch companies to find superior developers, it is often hard for top-notch developers to find superior companies to work for, especially remotely.

For these reasons, a high-caliber remote developer will often work that much harder to gain your trust and respect. Show her that trust, grant her that respect, and you’ll have more than a team player, you’ll have someone who’s unflinchingly loyal and committed to the success of your project.

MYTH #5: Qualified remote software developers are next to impossible to find.

REALITY: Not if you know where and how (and where and how not!) to look for them.

Well, if you get an unsolicited email from a company touting offshore resources, and it contains a whole slew of grammatical and typographical errors, that’s probably a pretty good indicator of a source that you don’t want to turn to for offshore hires. Remember, we’re looking for quality.

The sources for remote software engineering team members basically fall into three categories:

Offshore body shops. This is, unfortunately, the majority of what’s out there and much of the reason for the negative stereotypes that exist. They’re the ones we referred to earlier that promise extremely inexpensive services and then fail to deliver by even the most basic of professional standards. Avoid them. Like the plague. Period.

Independent consultants. This is where the needle-in-a-haystack challenge comes into play. The quality can vary widely. Some can can be cream-of-the-crop, but many tend to be inferior. The inferior ones are usually fairly easy to detect based on the low caliber of their communication skills or the level of desperation that they exude. The premier ones, on the other hand, can be elusive and hard to find, typically finding work through their own network of contacts. One negative with the best of these remote software developers is that they sometimes overcommit (to avoid a dry spell) and may fall behind on some of their deadlines as a result. After all, it’s hard to be your own marketing department. But that said, if you find one of these aces, and if they make your project a priority, they can be a tremendous asset to your team.

International freelance networking sites. A number of international freelance networking sites have emerged in recent years, intended to serve as marketplace to connect customers and remote software engineering resources around the globe. Many independent consultants utilize these networking sites as a means of augmenting their efforts to market their services. As a result, these sites offer customers a more centralized means of accessing global technical resources. However, these networks themselves are really just focused on providing a marketplace for technical services, rather than focusing on (or vouching for) the quality of the individual services offered. Accordingly, the challenge here remains that of quality; while some of the resources available through these networks are top-notch, the majority tend to be substandard.

To be sure, global networking is a greater challenge – potentially a much greater challenge – than local or domestic networking. But as has been discussed throughout this post, high quality technical resources do exist around the globe. By identifying a core group of stellar software engineers in key remote locations, and then using them as the nucleus from which to build out an ever-growing A+ network, one can realize the benefits of (and offer) a globally-distributed workforce, while minimizing the downside. The company I work for, Toptal, has done precisely that, and is in fact employing this business model with great success.

Wrap-up

Great developers live where great developers live. It’s that simple. Many are here in the U.S. Many are in South America. Many are in the Ukraine. No country or region has a monopoly on remote developers.

The challenge, whether domestically or abroad, is to navigate through the masses to identify the elite few. International high-end developer networks are emerging as a highly effective means of finding and tapping into these valuable resources across the globe. Indeed, great developers tend to gravitate toward great developers, wherever they may be. And that’s a fact.

Scott has 15+ years of experience recruiting software engineers and is the Director of Client Success at Toptal.

Comments

Saša Tokić

And many great developers live in Croatia ;)

Belisarius

This bodes very badly for developed-world software engineers. Unfortunately, until gov'ts step in and take action on the matter, employers essentially have no choice but to use offshore labour - regardless of their individual opinions of the practice - or risk being undercut by their competitors. And given that quasi-religious fervor for "free trade" has become ubiquitous amongst the developed-world's ruling classes (across nearly all political parties), gov't action seems highly unlikely.
For my part, I think I'm going to sign up for night courses in plumbing, or maybe car repair/maintenance. We're all going to need backup plans. Competing against folks who have access to $300/month housing, and are on average just as good as us, strikes me as a losing battle.

Dan Lash

Sooooo, got any tips on which "international high-end developer networks" are looking to expand their circles? Or hell - just a name or two would help. As a recent "high-end developer" leaving a great job to start a company (but also needs to pay bills), finding these networks seems to be a real challenge.

Eko Suprapto Wibowo

Well, not a good sign then, for us who differ with the US within 12hours interval!
But, I have worked with several US clients, and it runs well.
===
"Moreover, as long as the time of day at the remote location is within 5 or 6 hours of your time zone (which is true in a large percentage of cases), you’ll always have at least a few hours of overlapping “at work” time each day."

Resad Zacina

I have been working for years now in the outsourcing industry and as an independent remote consultant for US and European companies.
From my perspective, the company WORKFLOW is as important as the individual developer skills. As long as the company can successfully integrate on-site and remote workers in a meaningful workflow, even less talented developers can easily dive in. There are many Agile techniques and available tools today to accomplish the task and often the lack of management/communication skills from the hiring company itself are used as an excuse to say that remote collaboration is unsustainable. Structured training is also very important in the early phases, and that is one of the best ways for companies to get remote workers up to speed quickly. I also agree with you that the hourly rate is a pretty good indicator about the developer quality and hiring people that will work for 10$ an hour will eventually lead to disaster.

Barry

80% of my current team is remote. It works just fine.

Radan Skoric

The page this blog is on actually is such a network. :)

Eric Lubisse

Fair point. I might just do the same. On the flip side as software permeates more and more aspects of daily life demand for practitioners is still on the rise. I see some of the more critical development remaining onshore, close to HQ. Secondly the living standards in places like China, India, etc are rising pushing the salaries and operating costs up. At some point it will no longer be as economical to farm off development off-shore. I think there will be more of an equilibrium.

Chris Bloom

All good points. A Sr. Developer is a Sr. Developer no matter where they are located, and if being remote makes them more efficient then it's a win for everyone. I've been a remote employee since as early as 2006. There are challenges to being a remote developer, as well as working with remote developers. At Panoptic Development, we're 100% remote, but we put tools and practices in place to make it feel like we're just a desk or office away. We documented some of these at http://www.panopticdev.com/blog/9-tips-managing-remote-employees/. There's also a link at the bottom to a similar blog post from the remote developers end.

Asim Zaidi

We have excellent web developers at http://remotephpdevelopers.com
We are US based developers with rate that you would get in India :)